Stratholme
by Meridith
Summary: A young man tries to escape both the Scourge and his own kingdom's soldiers.


Dariahn Wheeler's last completely coherent thoughts were of escaping Stratholme. The city was in chaos, beset by Scourge soldiers on one side, beset by its own kingdom's army on the other, with the residents of the city caught in the middle. When he had heard earlier in the day that Arthas himself was arriving to defend the city he had been relieved, certain that their kingdom's prince would be able to push back the undead legion that had been slowly approaching. Dariahn had come down with a fever that morning, undoubtedly catching a little of what had kept his father at home for the last two days, and he was able to settle in for the night early feeling confident that the city would be safe.

But Dariahn had never been a heavy sleeper, and even ill the sound of soldiers' boots on the floor outside his room woke him. He sat up and his head immediately began to spin. He groaned as he struggled to stay upright, his whole body suddenly wanting desperately to just collapse. It was no wonder his father had stayed home from work if he had been feeling so bad. Force of habit made him think that he would need to let the blacksmith he had been working for know that he would also likely be too sick to do much of anything for a few days, but the sound of voices in the room next to his shook him out of it.

The young man watched the door for a moment, trying to pull his thoughts together. Were they evacuating? He didn't hear his father's voice among them. Something about the way they spoke made him instinctively grab his blanket around him and roll out of bed, crawling toward his wardrobe. He tucked himself inside, using the strap he had nailed to the inside of the door years ago to pull it closed behind him. He huddled in the darkness, shivering even with a blanket wrapped tight around him as sweat soaked through his shorts and drenched his otherwise bare body. He closed his eyes against the darkness and tried to listen past his racing, panicked thoughts. He had never been so sick, and as he listened to the soldiers talk as they opened his door and declared his room to be empty, it dawned on him that this might be the "plague" he had heard of the Scourge spreading. He slumped there at the bottom of his wardrobe as the thought sunk in. Was he dying, then? Was his father dying? What about his sister, who had visited just yesterday for dinner? Had she caught it, too?

The sound of the soldiers leaving barely registered. Huddled there in the dark, it was all Dariahn could do not to fall back asleep, even with a rising certainty that if he did he would never wake up. He stared into nothing for minutes, trying to muster the strength to move, to open the door, to _live_. Finally he shifted enough to lean against the door, knocking it open and spilling himself onto the floor in a bundle of blanket and limbs. He laid there for a moment, his breath heavy, then reached up to the strap on the door and slowly pulled himself to his feet. The air was cold on his burning skin as the blanket fell away. He struggled to get his thoughts together. Everything was becoming disjointed and out of focus in his mind, and every so often he thought he heard voices. He knew the fever was getting the better of him.

"Father..." The word rasped out through dry, cracked lips. Dariahn forced himself to stand, to move toward the door and into the hallway toward his father's room. Soft orange light flickered through the doorway onto the floor. He held up a hand to block the light as he looked around the corner into his father's room, lit so brightly now by something from outside the window, across the street. The blankets on his father's bed were dark red, dark red and flickering, moving orange and yellow and then he saw the burning houses and his father's hand hanging over the side of the bed dripping blood and understood through the fog of the fever that the soldiers weren't evacuating them at all, they were killing them and burning them because they were plagued, he was plagued and he was going to die and be taken up as their soldier and this had to be a horrible nightmare...

The pain of his body hitting the floor as he collapsed was enough to jolt him awake again. As he used the doorframe to pull himself back to his feet Dariahn noticed his father's sword resting against the wall. The well-worn leather-wrapped hilt shielded his hot fingers from the cold metal as he took it, strapping the scabbard around his bare chest as quickly as he could. He wanted to cry, to stop and think and let all this sink in, but it was all too much and there was no time. If he was going to escape to try to find someone who could fix things, he had to leave before his own house was torched.

Using the wall to hold himself up, Dariahn stumbled down the hallway back to his own room. He forced open the window that let onto the alley behind the house and climbed out onto the sill. The soldiers were trying to move quietly, but he could hear shouting in another part of the city, carried on a cold wind. His room was on the second floor, and he teetered up there for a moment, mustering his strength to lower himself to the ground as he had so many other times. The city lurched sickeningly around him as he fought for consciousness. The were dark voices on that wind, the guards and something else, something horrible. The guards. Was his sister there fighting? He shook his head sharply, his sweat-soaked hair slapping against his face as he tried to focus enoguh to keep his balance. He turned back to the dark bedroom and hooked his fingers under the lip of the sill. In better times he would have stepped off all at once, letting himself dangle by his arms from the sill before dropping gracefully to the ground. Tonight he lowered himself slowly, one foot at a time sliding down the wall until his strength gave out and he fell on his back onto the packed dirt below.

The sky between the rows of townhouses was churning with smoke, lit brightly by the fires below. As his breath came back to him he had to again fight against an increasingly overwhelming urge to stay there on his back and let himself slip away, to drift away into the smoke and the shouting and the darkness that seemed to be tugging at his very soul now. If not for the scabbard pressing into his back he likely would have. The discomfort of it was just enough to urge him on to gather what little of him remained and get to his feet. He had to live. He had to live because his father was dead and his kingdom had given up and damn it, he couldn't give up too.

Sitting up, he slipped the sword from his back and planted the tip in the ground, using it to pull himself to his feet before kneeling to vomit into the grass. He caught his breath and stood again, wiping his mouth with his forearm, staring blankly at the streaks of red in the bile and saliva. The sword felt a thousand pounds in his hands, his body felt a thousand pounds on his legs but he had to get out of the city. He moved and slipped through the shadows, relying on the soldiers to be too busy with their purging to notice a single young man moving through the alleyways to the city wall. He was moving almost entirely on instinct now, his thoughts growing hazy and detatched from the pain and weakness of his plague-wracked body as he pushed himself on with little more than the energy of his primal need to live. Streets and landmarks ceased to have meaning beyond their relative position to his escape as he left his home behind.

Dariahn reached the high stone wall unaccosted. He remembered through the haze a hole he had found once a few years ago where the mortar had worn out between a few of the lower stones. Sheathing his sword, he followed the wall until he found it, still unrepaired in a city that had until recently only known peace. Pain flared up again as the ragged stones lining the hole tore open his palms and elbows and knees as he crawled through to the other side, but it only registered as some distant nuisance. He had to keep going. He had to keep going. Trees rose up around him and he moved through them because he had no choice. It was the only way. Everything was distant and strange like a dream, and the voices were louder and they were terrible and they cackled and called but he had to keep going.

Dried leaves crackled loudly under him as he collapsed again. He lay there on the forest floor unmoving but for his labored breathing. His eyes glazed over as they pointed at the trees around him. Too weak to struggle any longer, he let the fog take him, if only for a moment of rest, and he dreamed.

He dreamed of a man draped in black robes and shadows appearing before him in the darkness just before dawn. There were darker forms among the trees behind him, terrible things, but Dariahn could feel that something about the man kept them at bay. The man stood over him, watching him with the smile of a mildly amused father. "Such a strapping young man, and so close to turning," he said, his voice low and noble. The shadows around him moved like a fog across the ground to where Dariahn lay. "A mind so close to death, so malleable, and with the seeds already planted," the man murmured as the shadows enveloped his prone body, feeling his mind and somehow drawing it back from the precipice of oblivion. "You would make a perfect soldier, perhaps even more." His smile widened, turned into a grin. "Wouldn't you agree, Dariahn?"

In his dream there was no pain, no weakness, and Dariahn slowly got to his feet to stand before the man. "Yes, sir."


End file.
